By Mike Huckabee
February 5, 2024
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Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
Daily Bible Verse
You will not have to fight this battle. Take up your positions; stand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you, Judah and Jerusalem. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Go out and face them tomorrow, and the Lord will be with you.
2 Chronicles 20:17
Newsletter Notes
11 stories
3,465 words
Reading time: About 16 minutes
Great Moments in Gaslighting
President Biden and the Democrats are trying to blame Republicans for the open border that they’ve spent the past three years opening while denying it exists. They claim that because Congressional Republicans (some, at least) won’t back a bill allowing for amnesty and more power and money for Biden to process even more illegal aliens into the US, there’s nothing Biden can do to seal the border without Congressional action. After all, just as arresting and jailing criminals doesn’t reduce crime, so putting guards and barriers on the border doesn’t reduce illegal immigration in the Fantasyland leftists live in.
Back here in Reality Town, all it took was for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to start doing Biden’s job for him, and the number of illegal entrant apprehensions in the Del Rio sector plummeted from up to 4,000 a day to 200.
And while Biden insists he’s exhausted all available options for securing the border, House Speaker Mike Johnson helped him out by sending him a list of 64 things he did to unseal the border that he could try, maybe, undoing.
https://www.speaker.gov/64-times-the-biden-administration-intentionally-undermined-border-security/
Not happy
I’m not happy about this story out of Oregon, about the state Supreme Court barring 10 Republican legislators from running for reelection. They staged a 42-day walkout to protest pro-abortion and “transing” of minors laws, which allegedly violated a new law barring the reelection of anyone who had 10 or more unexcused absence days.
There are a lot of complaints about the Democrat-appointed Justices and that the law could have been interpreted to mean banning running again after the NEXT election. But the protest was a calculated risk, and the law was passed by a majority of voters. If Democrats had done the same thing, I’m sure Republicans would have worked to hold them to it. The best I can say to Oregon Republicans is to turn out to vote in the next election and replace those who are departing with other Republicans who are just as willing to go to the mat for their values.
RIP Carl Weathers
It was announced that actor Carl Weathers, who played boxing champ Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” movie series, died in his sleep Tuesday at 76 of unrevealed causes.
Before going into acting, he was a top football player for San Diego State and had a brief NFL stint with the Oakland Raiders. His many other film credits include “Predator” with Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Action Jackson,” “Happy Gilmore,” “The Mandalorian,” and one you might not have known, the voice of Army action figure Combat Carl in “Toy Story 4.” Our prayers and condolences to his family.
Quick UPDATE on Oath Keepers’ conviction on apparently perjured testimony
We recently reported on investigative reporter Steve Baker’s look at J6 security cam footage from the Capitol and his finding that a key witness, Capitol Police Special Agent David Lazarus, couldn’t have been where he said he was to testify against members of the Oath Keepers. Unless he has a superpower that allows him to be in two places at one time, it appears that he could not possibly have seen what he claimed, under oath, to have seen.
In case you’re wondering what’s happened to Lazarus in the wake of this revelation, GATEWAY PUNDIT has an update. He’s reportedly leaving the department for “another agency” and, as far as we can tell from the report, will simply walk free. There aren’t many details at this time, but we’ll keep you posted. Surely, Baker’s finding will serve as the basis for a swift appeal of the Oath Keepers’ convictions. They were put away for over a decade on the basis of what now appears to be perjured testimony.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/02/special-agent-david-lazarus-who-lied-under-oath/
UPDATE:
I am very saddened to have to report that Mike Gill, the former chief of staff at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Trump, has died from injuries sustained last week when he was shot by a would-be carjacker just blocks from the White House. The carjacker also killed Alberto Vasquez, Jr., 28, during his attempted theft spree before he was killed by police.
Former CFTC chairman Christopher Giancarlo said that Gill was "one of the most wonderful, honest, earnest, and open-hearted persons on this earth. His life reflects everything that is good and right and true. Words cannot express the tragedy of the loss of this fine man, colleague, and cherished friend. He will be sorely missed and long remembered."
Our deepest condolences and prayers for his wife Kristina and their family.
How many more good people will have to be killed or injured, and how many families suffer such unspeakable grief, before voters finally have enough and rise up to demand an end to letting criminals run wild in our cities with no fear of the law?
The Senate Immigration Bill
That “bipartisan” Senate immigration reform bill that we’ve been hearing about for ages but haven’t actually seen finally poked its head out in public (appropriately enough, on Groundhog Day weekend) and promptly got it chopped off, signaling that there will be at least six more weeks of political posturing and finger-pointing over whose fault the open border is (hint: when Biden points his finger at the Republicans, four fingers are pointing back at him, including the middle one.)
This article from the Daily Caller has info on what’s in the bill, a link to the full, nearly 400-page bill (Please note: “Build wall, deport illegal aliens” is just five words) and some reactions to it.
And this from Fox News has the reaction from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who pronounced it “dead on arrival” in the House.
He tweeted, “This bill is even worse than we expected, and won't come close to ending the border catastrophe the President has created. As the lead Democrat negotiator proclaimed: Under this legislation, 'the border never closes.'" There are multiple reasons why conservatives reject it, among them:
The $118 billion bill includes nearly $50 billion to help Ukraine defend its borders from invasion by Russia, but only $20 billion to defend the US border from invasion by everybody.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/02/04/senate-bill-gives-ukraine-75x-funding-u-s-border-wall/
Even that $20 billion includes funding for expediting asylum claims and other paperwork issues that could be interpreted as processing illegal entrants into the US even faster. The bill also includes $14 billion in aid to Israel; Speaker Johnson said he would introduce a stand-alone bill to fund that.
It would give federal authorities temporary power to expel migrants when the daily flow reaches over 5,000, but why don’t they have the power to expel illegal entrants anytime, no matter what the number? FYI: 5,000 a day adds up to over 1.8 million a year. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Lankford, the lead GOP negotiator on the bill, claimed that number was 5,000 per week, but Guy Benson points out that the bill says 5,000 a day. Which is it? Personally, I don’t accept either one.
https://twitter.com/guypbenson/status/1754315802642092255
Also, why do we need to spend more money to speed up the processing of asylum claims? People seeking asylum are required to ask for it in the first nation they come to where their lives or rights aren’t allegedly in danger. Many pass through a number of other nations where that would apply before getting here, and if not, they could apply in Mexico. The fact is, most “asylum seekers” aren’t seeking asylum, they’re seeking American economic opportunities. At least, let’s hope that’s what they’re here for. And this bill would provide even more incentive by giving automatic work permits to asylum seekers.
Sen. Lankford claims he’s “confused” by the criticism, insisting that it fixes many problems and loopholes to increase border security. But Utah Sen. Mike Lee called it “asinine,” tweeting that much of the responsibility for enforcing and overseeing the bill’s provisions would be “left to the discretionary whims of (DHS) Secretary Mayorkas—who, I might add, is currently being impeached for failing to actually enforce existing law.”
Way Down
Speaking of border security, illegal crossings are way down in Texas at least, as Gov. Greg Abbott continues to do President Biden’s job for him in defiance of orders and threats to the contrary. While some radical leftists are demanding action by Biden to keep the flood of illegal immigrants flowing, Biden is in an election year with a subterranean approval rating and a recent poll showing 57% of registered voters across the racial and economic spectrum wanting more of the border wall built (that’s the wall that Trump started and Biden stopped and dismantled, apparently because it was a racist wall. Also, walls don’t work to provide security, unless they’re around the gated communities where pro-open-borders politicians live.)
And of course, if Biden wants to threaten Texas, he’d also be opposing more than half of US states that have sided with Texas. On Sunday, 13 Governors attended a briefing and press conference by Abbott, and I’m proud to say that the Governor of Arkansas was among them.’
Democrats choose Joe Biden in South Carolina
As I predicted, President Biden won an easy 96% victory in the South Carolina Democratic Primary on Saturday. The DNC stacked the deck like a bad birthday party magician, bullying challengers out of the race and rearranging the schedule to give him an early win (the GOP primary is following the traditional schedule, which means early voting starts next Monday with Primary Day on Feb. 24.) And now, we’re getting all the hoopla about Biden’s big comeback and his renewed strength as a candidate.
Take that claim with far more salt that Biden’s doctor would let him have. Here’s an inconvenient truth: Turnout in the SC Democratic primary was pathetic. Biden got 96% of only about 130,000 voters, or 4% of the state’s registered voters. In the 2020 election, 540,000 people voted in the SC Democratic primary. In short, all the ballyhoo over Biden’s “massive victory” is like trying to pass off a participation ribbon as a first-place trophy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/south-carolina-democratic-primary-turnout-for-2024/ar-BB1hKYKV
A shocking development
The wheel of history is slowly turning back toward sanity. In a shocking development, over the weekend, the New York Times (you heard that right: THE NEW YORK TIMES!) actually published an op-ed about detransitioners. It reports on how the “always affirm” gender dysphoria quackery (no matter what other red flags might be present) has destroyed the lives and bodies of many confused young people. It even includes horrifying photos of their scars.
Yes, it’s as equivocal as you’d expect from the Times, but it’s like the old saying about not criticizing the posture of a dog that walks on its hind legs: the miracle is that it was done at all.
Thanks also to Instapundit for sharing a tweet from Nashville writer Emily Zanotti, who theorizes that the wheels are starting to come off of the “transition your children” steamroller because now that they’ve done permanent physical and psychological damage to enough young people, the trial lawyers are starting to get involved. Some doctors and hospitals thought this butchery was a new cash cow, but that cow is about to be slaughtered by a tsunami of expensive malpractice lawsuits.
https://instapundit.com/630276/
Fun Read
Duncan Hunter of Townhall.com may blow your mind with his argument that all politicians should have to run for reelection every year. His point: as annoying as that would be, it would force them to behave all the time like the low-tax, anti-crime, pro-border security conservatives they claim to be in election years, instead of the radical leftwing nutjobs they are when they’re not running for reelection.
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2024/02/04/we-need-to-have-elections-every-year-n2634734
Why is FBI still refusing to reveal contents of Seth Rich’s laptop?
The FBI has a fallback way of handling inconvenient laptops. They hide them.
That’s what happened with Hunter Biden’s laptop, which held information that would’ve proved exculpatory for President Trump’s first impeachment hearing and also likely changed the outcome of the 2020 election if it had become known to voters. The FBI hid the existence of the Hunter laptop --- they’d had it since November 2019 --- for as long as they could and then, in anticipation of Miranda Devine’s breaking story in October 2020, labeled it Russian disinformation. Fifty-one former intel officials signed a letter to that effect, organized by now-Secretary of State Tony Blinken and saying it had all the “classic earmarks,” when they’d never seen the contents at all. Both the media and then-presidential candidate Joe Biden echoed that lie before the election. Biden repeated the lie in front of a worldwide audience to deflect questions about it during a debate with Trump. The DOJ and FBI worked like fiends through private social media companies (which is unconstitutional) to dismiss stories about it. But they later admitted it was genuine, after the damage was done.
Today, the FBI is still trying to hide the contents of another laptop (actually two) belonging to the late Seth Rich, and they may be running out of options. Are they eventually going to try writing a similar letter dismissing THIS laptop as Russian disinformation? After all, it’s got a Russia connection, too, as it’s tied to the so-called “Russian hack” of DNC emails. That “hack” story was the beginning of the “Russia Hoax.”
As retired detective Ron Wright, a 35-year investigator, noted in a new piece for AMERICAN THINKER, the Russia Hoax operation began before the Trump-Clinton election in 2016, officially starting with the FBI’s ginned-up Crossfire Hurricane case and the FISA warrant to spy on campaign associate Carter Page, and continued through the 2020 election. As Special Counsel John Durham wrote in conjunction with the Michael Sussmann trial, it “was created, paid for, and leaked to the media at the behest of Hillary Clinton...aided by the FBI and CIA.” Considering what a Democratic National Committee staffer might have had on his laptop that incriminated certain people in this effort, it’s easy to see why the FBI and CIA might have gone to great lengths to keep it under wraps.
Seth Rich was that staffer, a data analyst. After his July 2016 murder on a DC street (we’ll get to that), his laptop was obtained by the FBI. Brian Huddleston, suing in the case Huddleston v. Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Department of Justice, has been trying to get information from Rich’s computer since 2017. The FOIA requests he filed for the laptop’s contents and other information have been repeatedly met with non-compliance, even though a federal district court has twice ordered them to release it, once on September 29, 2022, and again on November 28, 2023.
The FBI initially lied and said it had no information responsive to the request, but they later admitted to having thousands of records, including his work laptop and a copy of the contents of his personal laptop. They’ve used various excuses, notably that the information on the laptop was “not an agency record” and was personal. (There is no right to privacy after a person is deceased; besides, they’re still concealing the WORK laptop.) They eventually said they’d release the records but that it would take approximately 66 years to go through them and do that.
Now, in the latest round of court filings, Huddleston has tried again, saying, “After more than six years of delays and denials, it is time for the FBI to come clean. A Presidential election is fast approaching, and voters have the right to know (1) whether the FBI knowingly framed one of the frontrunners, i.e., former President Trump, and (2) whether the FBI is still trying to cover up its partisan political activities”
The FBI has filed a response saying that Huddleston’s position “is irrelevant to the FOIA case.” How do we know whether or not it’s relevant unless they release the information? And why do they care so much? This is a highly unusual amount of caring.
“The DOJ and FBI are playing games with the court,” according to Wright. And these games stretch on for years. It’s their unending effort to bury this information that has naturally led some to believe that Rich’s laptop contains information that implicates the intel agencies in the creation of the false Russia collusion narrative. At this point, we’ve already seen that they were involved, so this new information, if it exists, would confirm what we know.
We don’t know, but it might also provide some insight into why Rich died in what was said to be a botched robbery. (He was killed with two shots to the head while walking home in the early morning hours on a DC street and nothing of value was taken.) It that’s true, the case would have to be re-opened, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder.
Quoting Wright: “Given the FBI’s deliberately created information vacuum, it’s reasonable to ask whether Rich was murdered to conceal the actual source of the DNC server hack, which harmed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Did Rich remove these emails from the DNC server and deliver them to Julian Assange of Wikileaks, who subsequently published them? The FBI and others wove the DNC hack into the Russian narrative and blamed the Russians. If Rich was the source of the DNC leak, he could expose and destroy the Russian narrative.”
It’s sad that such speculation has arisen about our FBI, but they’ve destroyed their own credibility. Director Christopher Wray’s non-responsiveness to questions from Congress reinforces that loss of confidence.
And now, with the approach of the 2024 election, the FBI seems to be using their same strategy to keep Rich’s computer buried, along with any other information about him. They’re doing this even though it inevitably invites speculation about why Rich died and why there’s been such a cover-up. I think we may assume from this that if the truth came out, it would make them look even worse --- perhaps much, much worse --- than they do already.
For more background information on Seth Rich’s death, here’s Wright’s article from September. It gives the basics on the Russia Hoax and then connects it to the Seth Rich case. Yes, his conclusions will sound a bit conspiracy-theorist, but the FBI could put that all to rest if they’d just release the information.
And here’s a must-read AMERICAN THINKER archival piece by Jack Cashill focusing on how Seth Rich’s possible connection to Julian Assange became public and the subsequent controversy and litigation over that. It came out in 2020, but now there’s much more context for the information.
SOMEWHAT RELATED: Speaking of anti-Trump Russia hoaxers, count Andrew Weissmann among those who were just crushed by the delay in Trump’s trial that Jack Smith had pushed for an early-early date of March 4. In a posting on X, he used a bit of legal terminology we’d never heard: “SNAPADOODLE!”
On MSNBC, they’re predictably weeping and gnashing their teeth. And Ruth Marcus, associate editor at the WASHINGTON POST, came completely unglued, calling the delay “unconscionable.” She actually blamed Trump for trying to “manipulate the system,” when all he and his attorneys did was take advantage of his constitutional right to due process as any defendant would. Of course, to those infected with TDS, Trump isn’t like other American citizens and has no right to due process. And they just can’t wait to rush him into court, even if it means skipping over a step or two!
Julie Kelly called these people “political vultures” and has written an especially entertaining column about them.
Trump Trial Vultures Bully Appellate Court for Immunity Decision (declassified.live)
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